Reportage Illustration

Aussie Adventures: 1: A short stop-off in Singapore on the way to Western Australia

Most of you reading this will already be aware that I spent much of December 2015 travelling (5th December 2015-2nd January 2016). I visited my sister and family in Perth on the West Coast of Australia, travelling from there south to the Wine region: Margaret River for my nephew’s wedding and North from Perth up the coast before returning to Perth for Christmas. This first of four blogs shares the sketches from my whistle-stop tour of Singapore. Actually, I hardly touched the surface in the couple of days we stopped over there on the way to Perth, but I wanted to share my sketches to show the contrast between this place and Australia as well as to show sketches done rather fast, in hot humid conditions which made it very difficult to dry the paint! This is rainy season so dodging the heavy showers was also a challenge!

The travel was made more exotic by the rather elegant dresses of the Singapore airlines staff so this was an obvious thing to capture in a sketch. The constant movement and bustle made them difficult to capture but good practice nevertheless!

Of course with only two days and feeling a bit exhausted, all I was able to do was capture a few impressions of this amazing city. The top map just gives a flavor of the different areas of the city, with Little India and Kampong Glam the two main areas visited. The bottom image is the street where we stayed and was very much a typical shopping street although the number of malls of the main street was somewhat amazing: so many shops. The Christmas decorations here were also rather stunning. The Gardens by the Bay visit was really just to see the superstructure trees which are such a photographed, iconic aspect of the gardens. As a landscape architect, I am fascinated by the development of this city and the concept of a City in a Garden. The greenery everywhere is notable and shows the validity of the ideal.

Temples in Little India and Kampong Glam are elaborate and challenging to capture. There are over 35 Hindu temples in Singapore, here are just a couple from the Little India area. The first: Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple is one of the key attractions in the area, with ornate carvings of gods forming the central tower. For more information on the Hindu temples of Singapore, here is a link.

Little India was a great place to get some fast food in the form of Southern Indian cuisine. Masala Dosa with all the usual lovely lentil and spice based accompaniments together with fresh lemonade and all home made! I didn’t manage to sketch the food, but I did sketch the café!

The streets of Little India and Kampong Glam are teaming with life and I tried to capture this quickly in these two sketches:

Of course no visit to Singapore would be complete without a trip to the famous Raffles Hotel. As it happened, there was a restaurant bar across the road with outside seats, enabling these sketches to be created:

So as I said, a real fast track though Singapore but next up my Aussie Adventures 2 to include reportage of my nephew’s wedding as well as my general Margaret River sketches.